


Eureka

by Lokei



Category: Fantastic Four (Movieverse)
Genre: F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Humor, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-01-18
Updated: 2008-01-18
Packaged: 2017-10-19 02:22:48
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/195791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lokei/pseuds/Lokei
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>for <a href="http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/"><b>romanticalgirl</b></a>’s “First-Times-Challenge-A-Thon-Thing.”</p>
    </blockquote>





	Eureka

**Author's Note:**

> for [](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/profile)[**romanticalgirl**](http://romanticalgirl.livejournal.com/)’s “First-Times-Challenge-A-Thon-Thing.”

Reed had never really gotten the whole ‘sex’ thing. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy it, it was certainly pleasant enough, but he just didn’t understand why so many people seemed to think so much of it, not to mention about it. There was always just so much else to consider, other questions more fascinating, problems more absorbing, than the predictable biochemical responses of a physiological impulse.

===

The first time Reed kissed a girl was really the other way around. He’d been outside the back of the high school gym, trying to figure out if he could convince the school janitor to let him up on the roof of the gym. He was thinking it was probably high enough to use for his inertial dampeners experiment, and wanted to marshal the appropriate arguments to prove that he wasn’t just another hare-brained first year physics student who wanted to drop eggs from on high and enjoy the resulting sticky mess. (Reed had gotten over that when he was eight, after all, and cleaning egg out of his aunt’s carpet for the fourth time had finally convinced him that the scientific advances in egg-drop-physics were not worth the attendant splatter.)

So there he was, minding his own business, when he found himself being poked in the shoulder by Janine, whose name he mostly remembered because his lab partner Derrick talked about her—and her lunkhead jock boyfriend—somewhat incessantly. In fact, if Reed had to calculate the percentage of Derrick’s conversation which revolved around Janine, her physical attributes, and her unfortunate choice of male company, it would be roughly 89.359% of the time. It was only an approximate calculation because Reed had a tendency to tune Derrick out after the first ten minutes of any lab period, and so his data collection and retention was admittedly faulty.

When he said, “Janine,” however, she seemed to take it as her due that he’d know her name, though he was still congratulating himself on it when her pink candy-flavored lip gloss was suddenly too close, and then closer, smearing strangely in a mash of lips and quick breaths. Reed was still working through the probability that her lunkhead linebacker would be arriving from practice at any moment and the attendant probability that he’d soon be flattened to a bloody pulp against the wall when she stepped back and grinned at him. Reed blinked and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“The geek thing works for you, Reed. You should go with that,” Janine winked, tossed her cheerleader hair, and headed for the gym doors, leaving Reed with an entirely new understanding that he had no idea within what parameters teenage girls operated.

===

The first time Sue dumped him in college it took Reed over a month to get back in her good graces. It took two weeks to figure out why it was she was so upset, to begin with. How was he supposed to know that it bothered her that he kept getting out of bed to check time-sensitive experiments? He was used to disrupted sleep schedules for the sake of the science, and so was she, so what was the problem?

Apparently it had something to do with ‘typical male behavior’ and some ‘inexplicable female desire for cuddling,’ according to his female chemistry lab partner and his male astrophysics study partner, respectively. Reed filed ‘cuddling’ under the same category as candy-flavored lip gloss and decided abject apologies would do the trick.

They didn’t. According to Sue, lack of ‘cuddling’ was less worrisome than the fact that she suspected he scheduled these time-sensitive experiments for when he would be seeing her, and therefore would have an excuse to get up and leave. She furthermore thought this was sneaky and underhanded, and if he didn’t want to spend time with her he could damn well say so.

Explaining that it was the other way around—he wanted to see Sue when he had experiments to run because then he knew he wouldn’t be sleeping anyway and it was the most efficient use of both their time—was apparently also a bad idea. This meant that Reed could count this experience as the first time someone threw a coffee mug at his head, too.

Three more weeks of groveling and a whole lot of expensive chocolate in a brand new coffee cup meant she was speaking to him again, finally. It was about time—Reed really needed someone to be a sounding board for his ideas on molecular destabilization in a black hole accretion disk.

===

The first time Johnny spooned up behind Reed at his lab bench in the Baxter, Reed froze. As his mind ticked over, it occurred vaguely to him that ‘freezing’ and Johnny really didn’t belong in the same sentence, and that he didn’t actually remember the specific heat for rubber, and that that was probably something he should look into, as a matter of self-preservation for future reference. He was just thinking that he was glad it was higher than the melting point for a number of other substances when Johnny bit his ear and growled,  
“Stop thinking, Richards.”

And unbelievably, even to himself, Reed stopped. He was emphatically not thinking when a heated, calloused hand slipped up and under his shirt, and he was several million units of atomic weight away from rationality when the other hand took a symmetrical path on the diametrically opposite tangent. He was not running equations of any sort when he leaned his head back to let astonishingly warm lips graze his jawbone, and the schematics he had been so incredibly focused on moments before fell unnoticed from nerveless fingers and slid away from an equally nerveless mind.

Several long, shaking minutes later, Reed turned awkwardly in the frame of Johnny’s arms where he was still held against the lab bench, certain the signs of incipient mental breakdown were showing on his face. Distressingly (though unsurprisingly, if Reed had to admit it), Johnny seemed unmoved by Reed’s lack of coherence. Smug was the only word for that expression on the other man’s face, really, and if ‘smugger’ was the appropriate comparative adjective, that was what was happening now.

“I,” Reed began, wondering if his brain had, in fact, melted after all. “I never knew—“

And he didn’t know how to finish that sentence, either, but Johnny seemed to get it anyway. He grinned and rocked into Reed, just a little, eyes softer than the scientist expected.

“There’s a first time for everything, Reed.”


End file.
